


5 AM

by angelica_barnes



Series: Without You [3]
Category: One Direction (Band), Taylor Swift (Musician)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Five Years Later, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Other, going slightly insane, not moving on, when you should be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 00:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15352533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_barnes/pseuds/angelica_barnes
Summary: taylor lives alone.her brother's gone.she doesn't know what to think.she doesn't know how to think.she doesn't know why.why anything.





	5 AM

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from "5 O'Clock" by T-Pain ft. Lily Allen & Wiz Khalifa

Taylor doesn’t know how to laugh.

She used to, back when Harry was singing and dancing around their kitchen and waking her up with kisses and sending her random nonsensical texts at work.

But that’s over now.

It’s been over for a long time.

The other boys are here though, with Zayn resting in Liam’s arms while Niall is screeching Irish love songs because he’s drunker than all of them combined and Louis just looks sad.

Taylor doesn’t like to, but she tends to think that her wellbeing is the only reason they still come around.

 

 

-

 

She wishes them a goodnight, a slurred one, and makes her way up the stairs, wobbling on her untrustable legs, socks slipping on the slick wood.

She walks down the hall, and normally she would pass Harry’s bedroom, but tonight she can’t just… she can’t just leave it.

She pushes open the door and it creaks in protest, the floorboards whine and she lets her eyes wander around the room, to the posters and books and journals and drawings and microphones and computers and just everything he left behind.

Well, it was almost everything.

Now it’s everything, because she’s standing in the middle of the room, crying silently; but can you blame her?

It’s been five years, but that doesn’t change the fact that he left her, too.

 

 

-

 

Taylor falls back onto his bed.

Quite literally, after spinning around to see every wall and then tripping over a stack of books and flailing as she staggers backwards, but it’s still falling.

Just not gracefully.

But anyway, she lands and a cloud of dust puffs into the air, because she hasn’t touched this room since Harry… uh, went away.

She still can’t say it out loud, let alone think it.

And she curls in on herself, falling asleep amongst covers and sunsets and evenings and memories and she swears.

She swears, if only for a moment, her brother’s there holding her.

 

 

-

 

She ends up tracing shapes and letters and names on the wall, and none of them are Harry’s favorites or Harry’s friends or Harry’s anything, because she’s trying to move on, she really is. 

Desperately so.

But it’s kinda hard, especially with his stuff littered around the house collecting particles of dead skin because she can’t bear to move it.

“Taylor?” Liam’s voice comes soft and gentle from the doorway, and Taylor pretends she’s sleeping. Liam sighs, finally, and she hears footsteps before a kiss is planted on her hair and fingers caress her cheek for a moment and she thinks, that in another lifetime, maybe she could love Liam the way he loves her; with sympathy, and actual care, but she doesn’t have any of that.

“Sweet dreams, baby girl,” he whispers to her, and then he leaves the room, and she’s lying there with watery eyes and a slightly-completely broken heart.

 

 

-

 

Taylor rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling, thinking of how it’s pitch black because the blinds are closed, and if she just opened them, the sun would come streaming in. 

But she doesn’t want it there, blinding her sight.

And in the dark, she believes, it’s easier for Harry to see her. Because she never did believe in ghosts, up until then, and now she does and luckily nobody thinks she’s going any sort of insane, except for herself.

“Harry,” she whispers into the dark. “Come home.”

And he doesn’t, no figure or bright light appears in the doorway, but somehow the iPod starts up and  _ Two Ghosts  _ begins to play softly, and it’s calming.

She sits there with her eyes closed, facing the doorway, letting the music surround her and fill her empty to the brim and then run off and leave her like everything does eventually, and she’s tired.

She hopes, she prays, for any kind of miracle but other than cold coffee she knows she’s not gonna get one.

 

 

-

 

She wanders down to the kitchen when the sun finally begins to bother her, and she opens up a bottle of vodka with a pop and pours it into a glass, and she sips leisurely while staring warily out the window, and that’s when she sees his gravestone.

Shit, now she remembers why she never comes in here anymore, why she’s got a stash of food that’s enough to feed a village hidden in her room; now she remembers.

And it’s kind of funny, isn’t it?

So she lets a hollow, familiar sound rip from her throat, and she knows it’s not a sob because she’s heard that too many times to count in the past five years, so this noise is just a distant memory, a recent acquaintance.

_ Oh,  _ she realizes, and the sound dies.

Taylor knows how to laugh now.


End file.
